“It’s not necessarily a feminist reason, but it’s just my name for 33 years of my life,” Donna Suh told the New York Times after data showed less women were doing so.

“Plus, I’m Asian and he’s not, so it’s less confusing for me to not have a white name. And on social media I thought it might be harder to find me.”

Towards the 15 Century, the notion of a husband’s ownership over his wife when she took his name changed, with religious reasoning taking prominence.

Dr Sophie Coulombeau notes that English jurist Henry de Bracton said a man and woman become ‘a single person, because they are one flesh and blood’, therefore share one name.

The tradition continues to the modern day, but the fact remains it is still a woman who, upon marriage, takes the man’s name and never the other way round.

Women have also expressed a feeling of ‘losing an identity’ after changing their names then dwelling on the decision.

Joni Erdmann, who adopted her husband’s surname McClain, wrote in the Huffington Post: “We have an innate connection to our names, and after some time being a McClain, I started to feel disconnected from everything.

“This of course speaks in part to the marriage itself, but I felt lost walking around with a name that didn’t represent me in any way other than my affiliation with a man. I felt as though I had vanished behind my husband and his endeavors — which was the reason this practice was created in the first place.”

Erdmann concludes that marriage ‘should be a marker of an egalitarian partnership, not a succession of one party behind the other’.

“Your name should reflect that,” she writes, whatever a woman decides to do.